


dent-de-lioun

by handschuhmaus



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Redemption thwarted, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Rule 63, The Force Is Not Kind, also it's unclear if it's even real, and wrecks them so doing because they are mere objects to her in a game, because here (not in all my writing), biased/semi-unreliable narrator, but it's kinda blink and you'll miss it and find a few lines confusing, especially the Skywalkers but they aren't the focus here, okay so basically what I'm saying is the Force is like The Gentleman in JSMN here, the Force is greedy and will take and take and take, the Force uses and toys with people and sometimes gives them what she thinks they might want, the Star Wars universe is not kind, the tragedy of Palpatine Darth Sidious, what do you do if you serve a petty and vengeful deity who demands evil of you
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-06 17:35:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14061945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: The Force is a thankless mistress, who demands her desires and cares little for yours.





	dent-de-lioun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notbecauseofvictories](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Et in Arcadia ego](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5942029) by [notbecauseofvictories](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories). 
  * Inspired by [Astriferous](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2303972) by [postcardsfromrussia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardsfromrussia/pseuds/postcardsfromrussia). 



> (I'm sorry, notbecauseofvictories; I'm not even sure you care about this bit of the canon.)
> 
> "Daylily king,  
> what happened  
> to the world you dreamed?  
> ...there's nothing beautiful left"
> 
> -This Is Deer Country

**one**

This is your first awareness of your place within the grand structure that is the universe: you are malicious and unwanted--you are the weeds spoiling the placid green of the landscaping and attempting to overrun it.

But they won't say it plainly. When they know you're in earshot, they flatter, they cajole, and it makes your blood boil. You still learn to parrot it back. He is the worst of the bunch, because from what you overhear, the way he scolds you in scalding words when no one of import can overhear, the looks, the refusal to touch you--it will become plainly obvious that the act he puts on in public is false.

You will never be a hero--you are fated not to be, in this world, in this _galaxy_ , where he is what the public likes to see and you--you are ever lacking, stamped with the rejection of an accident of birth, that you are not his son, nor the child he wants.

Weeds, however, grow where fate has flung them, and grow vigorously. 

**two**

There are people who pluck weeds, and you hope desperately, fervently, that Hego Damask is one, for he looks at you with purpose more than disdain.

You are plain (but such dreadful features, they say) and queer and bold and arrogant, even though the latter is the face you put on to hide what you know you are, so the world is less offended, so it will hand you (perhaps) what you deserve as much or more than _him._

Damask peers beneath your mask, and lifts up his own.

You look a burning star on a sure course to supernova, whose gravity you had failed to notice, in the eye.

He bids you kill, he bids you murder, those secret thoughts you hadn't dared to admit even to yourself in the light of day. He also introduces you (or more like, brings up the fact of the encounter) to the Force.

**three**

The Force, thing of nature that it is, does not distinguish weeds from other plants.

You fall hard, you fall in flame, towards this black hole he has obscured, and you bypass Damask (for now) for this thing you have been searching for all your life, without knowing it at all. 

You tell it _yes, yes I will_ , for you are drunk on the heady emotion of acceptance, even though you have not asked what it would have you do.

**eight**

_die for me._

It is not your young life, carrying such obscure potential, that you may sacrifice now (that is already done, but it was a sacrifice in the living and not a simple, easy, foregoing of the living), but a withered husk, showing plain the monster you have been all along.

You are also asked, now, to serve up young Skywalker's life, as tribute, even though it has not been--however you wanted it--yours to give.

_die for me._

He can't save Anakin Skywalker, not with the Force. You tried, her most faithful servant, and you could not succeed, and it convicts you that you continued in her service when she demanded him, and demands Luke, child of the desert, who loves readily even into his third decade, as well. 

Of course, it's true that since you tried to bargain for Anakin, tried to bargain for a few months of your own life, you have fallen back further in sync with her, yielded to the irresistible pull.

She consumes planets and stars with nary a doubt and here on this second destroyer of worlds, you are not about to defy her. But what good would anything do, now?

**_four_ **

It does not make you comfortable to conceive of the Force as Master. Perhaps you are not meant to be comfortable, and you are no man to have one, but instead you call her Mistress. For Damask calls you Sith, calls you Lady Sidious, and says that you, both of you, and all Sith, master the Force yourself unlike the Jedi. So "Mistress", as is common of ships and other vehicles crewed by men who devote half and more of their lives to the vessel, seems fair enough.

That is a comforting lie, that Sith may command her, and you do not know whence nor when Damask willfully blinded himself to the gaping discrepancy in that view. To you, weed, teeth of the lion, and that treacherous lioness who overthrew (but with the will of the Force!) her sire, it is plain as the moon and stars at midnight.

Damask calls you to rank barbarism, to uncivilization, but via the trappings of ugly _civilized_ politics.

You ask your mistress of a handful of years, more powerful than any lover your father took to further political ambitions, if this is indeed how you should serve her, but there is only the silence and shadow of the night, or even a withdrawing. And you have no other ready option.

**six**

In your inner heart of hearts you do not want to fully deliver up Anakin Skywalker to the Force that he too has been pledged to (for what options are there, that the son of a slave woman should escape and go free?); you are covetous, deeply, of him, and cannot stand the prospect that he will be made, once again, (you quietly confess it) _slave._

You, as you said, watch his career with interest, listen to the subtle doubts he cannot voice asking the Jedi for they already verge on rejecting him anew. Of the Jedi, except Skywalker, your impetuous mistress demands so little relative to you. They live and die for her but they are permitted the accolades of heroes, to act according to their own counsel, to be heralded for doing right. You have only ever garnered praise as a sham, as something not reflective of your inner nature.

Naturally, given your upbringing, you are not often readily sympathetic to others, but you wonder whether that is true, that the public worships the Hero With No Fear but not the once-slave boy inside, of him as well. But you do not think he is so keenly aware of it, if it is so. He was a pleasant child, despite the crushing circumstances whence he came, and you do not think his mother, the slave woman, raised him to think so badly of himself. Oh, he is capable of being terrible, but until the Jedi frowned and pronounced judgment upon his natural instincts, he did not despise himself, as you had of necessity.

(You never voice it, never ask, but sometimes in the dark you wonder if you, chosen horrifically, were for once made a laughingstock and after ever tortured, for you, no son, no man, to be the Force-made father of the Chosen One. You cannot protect him, but you too, of the Force as you are, you too dearly want him.)

But you do gather him up, as a bantha calf to the slaughter; you are the only confidante who sees him as both the prized Force vessel and a person in his own right. Amidala (you know of the affair) takes the best of both and loves an image of a hero Jedi, the better to pair with the former queen. She cannot know, only extend sympathies, about the struggle it is to belong to the Force. And yes, the Jedi--they do not understand either; they are her complacent, spoiled children who do not have deep dark dreadful fantasies they may be called upon to extend and enact.

 _No,_ you plead, even as you lay the trap. But she rebukes you swiftly, like a strap to your hand. 

_He is mine, and you--you need not be. Without my favor..._ the threat is implied, but plenty to freeze you in your seditious tracks. You may commit high treason against the Republic, but never against that sacred power to which you are pledged.

**seven**

Now you are empire; _l'etat c'est moi_ ; you are the Senate, or at least the only voice it cannot defy. And you have had the Jedi destroyed, like a petulant princess's now unwanted playthings she demanded be burnt. But you are wrapped layers deep in chains and trappings that your reviled father had hoped to glory in, when blood still pumped in his veins. You have everything you had ever hoped to lord over your father, and it's the last place you'd like to be in the whole wide galaxy, given your druthers.

You are plainly bestial now, eyes an inhuman yellow and face a mess of wrinkles, but you still (having got all Damask thought you should want, having gotten rid of him) ask one last time what you have not dared voice before, _let me be good now, let me be kind, let me serve you some other way, let me know this_ love _that other people do (for I have not known it from any person, even of my own blood and this you know, you must, because I have given myself up to you.)_

The answer is not hesitant; it does not empathize with your plea to for once wash your hands of blood and act as Anakin had before all your people, all the Force's servants, had despoiled him. It is not regretful of what has and may be asked _of_ you; for all that now you beg to be remade not a sword but a plough (although perhaps that is the problem: perhaps you are asked to plough under the crop and ready the fields and some of them salt so that none may grow there again)--

Plain and readily, the Force says _no_

**nine**

Hego Damask had been granted the secrets of extending life, perhaps another trick. But what the Force wants it gets, you know by now, and it wants one last audience from your soul.

 _Why?_ you breathe inside your mind, and affix it to none of the dozens of particular questions you would like an answer to.

 _You are my faithless servant_ , she mocks, appearing as a mockery of your late appearance: larger than life, eight feet tall on a throne, shrouded in black with whatever face she has hidden in the hood. Her voice rumbles fit to shake the world.

 _Faith **ful!**_ you contradict, feeling the foundations of temples crack at your words.

_But you did not even know me, for years._

It certainly passes through your head that this aspect of your life was not your doing, but you do not care to contradict her just then. 

_The Jedi are mine as well,_ even though she has no reason to say that.

 _And you bade me destroy them,_ you respond, because it seems like something you should say.

 _I could not demand of them what I have asked of a wretched animal like you,_ she says pensively, and a dry gritty wind whips up, stinging what skin it is you have here.

It is a righteous but muted rage that fills you: even when you are not, you have always been the unwanted stepchild, never the beloved, and never the cherished. If the Jedi are hers as well, those she has chosen to destroy, they are also those of whom she has never required the violations she asked of you. The man who brought Anakin Skywalker to _her_ , whom Tyranus had loved as Lady Sidious never has (and weren't you jealous, of what might, perhaps, have been with Maul), was allowed to die believing in a benevolent Force. And so were the rest of them, more or less. But you, you have been given this ugly truth.

The wind takes you with it, scattering the particles of your rage and of your soul along with the sand it carries.

**five**

There is a brief period when you think you know what it is to be happy. There is natural order to the universe, and if you are endentured to the Force and orbiting a Muun banker who frightens you for all he mirrors your innermost, and does not merely endure your presence but relishes it, somehow--perhaps that is how it was meant to be, and the way to become happy.

Your public, as an ambassador, listens and applauds you, and does not telegraph scorn with their faces. The same as you will become senator, then chancellor. The Force is with you and Ambassador--no, Chancellor Palpatine is a flower widely appreciated. You are in your golden age.

The nights are emblazoned with stars and city lights and the heady smell of banquet food, and you cannot remember whether this is an errand the Force granted--demanded of you, or something you (and Damask, preying about his lab) have begged for. 

But she asks and you do as the Force bids; you are acting for her, not yourself, and being made to forcibly _have_ a slave woman in what is not quite simply dream, nor vision (she will say this child has no father, and this is true), in what is often inappropriately called love, throws you into a childish tantrum on waking. 

Even she (and perhaps it is that, that turn of phrase, that induced the notion), the Force, is not pleased in you, for a daughter. Does not accept that _that_ you had no will whatsoever to do. And this is nothing you asked for, nothing, really, like you hoped happiness would be, and you have given and given and the Force does not care what that does to you or what she demands of her tool.

**Author's Note:**

> ~~I don't think fem!Palpatine would be "beautiful" per societal standards, although that is not to say she wouldn't be quite striking in appearance.~~
> 
>  
> 
> Not every single thing said is necessarily quite true, except perhaps from a certain point of view (and not in the Ben Kenobi sense), within this 'verse. (e.g. the last scene? Accurate to her perception, but would anyone else agree? I don't know...)
> 
> (Note regarding the work: I'm drafting some potential commentary in the "next chapter", which has probably caused this to have an "incomplete" status, but this is in fact the extent of this piece. The only continuation here would be commentary. ~~if the muse strikes me, I won't rule out something similar but...this is pretty much a full story~~ )

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [orange blossom water and pomegranate seeds](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16074977) by [handschuhmaus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus)




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